House of Commons Hansard Debates for 15 Dec 1998 (pt 11)

4.37 pm

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Jack Straw): Londoners are justly proud of their city. It is our national capital, and one of the foremost cities in the world. It is famed for its diversity and for its financial and business might. It is a cultural magnet for the rest of Europe and well beyond. London's history, museums, monuments and restaurants draw visitors in their millions.

Yet, in spite of all those strengths, London's governance is a mess. Difficult decisions are not taken and no one is able to provide Londonwide solutions to Londonwide problems such as pollution, poverty and the crumbling transport infrastructure. Uniquely among major cities, London has no leader. How is our capital supposed to continue to compete with New York, Paris and Tokyo when it has no one to speak for it?

Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister spelled out the overall case for the creation of a mayor and an assembly for Greater London. Today, I want to concentrate on parts VI and VII of the Bill, which make relatively minor changes to the London fire and emergency planning authority and very significant changes to the accountability of the Metropolitan police.

I shall deal first with the fire authority. Our proposals in part VII for setting up the London fire and emergency planning authority recognise that the present authority is already a strategic and representative body for the whole of London and that the present arrangements work well, so our changes here are relatively prosaic. The new authority will be a reconstituted form of the present authority and will inherit its staff, functions and powers. However, it will have a smaller membership of 17--just over half the existing number. The majority of members will be assembly representatives appointed by the mayor. The rest will be representatives of the London boroughs. Like all fire authorities, it will remain democratically

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accountable to local people. The proposed arrangements will provide streamlined decision making and will establish a clear relationship between the mayor, the assembly and the authority.

Part VI is concerned with the Metropolitan police, who are also covered by clauses 80 and 81 on finance and schedules 16 and 17. The Metropolitan police authority will be the first police authority for London to be democratically accountable to Londoners. That step is long overdue. It is right in principle, and it should improve the way in which we tackle crime and disorder in the capital.

Before justifying those statements, I shall describe some of the key staging posts in the history of the Metropolitan police. Sir Robert Peel was the architect of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 which established the force. That Act made provision for two justices with powers to direct and control the force, under the authority of the Home Secretary. Two justices--or commissioners, as they were soon to be called--were duly appointed: Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, who worked in tandem for the next 21 years. Even today, the offices of Metropolitan Police Commissioner and deputy Commissioner are civilian posts. Only in the force's post-war history has the Commissioner been a police officer.

I was looking at the portraits in New Scotland Yard and reminding myself that the Commissioner appointed in 1945 had been the permanent under-secretary in the Home Office immediately beforehand. He was wedged into a uniform and put in charge of the Metropolitan police.

Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex): Typical Labour fix.

Mr. Straw: I suspect that it was a Conservative fix, or a coalition fix. The tradition before that had been that Commissioners and deputy Commissioners were appointed from the armed forces, and it is only since the war that police officers have run the force at Commissioner level, but they are still considered to be civilians. That is one of many anomalies that the Bill will sweep away.

When Peel proposed an organised police force for London, many people objected, as they had done for decades. In 1785, just three years after the post of Home Secretary was established, such was the opposition to a London police force that William Pitt had been obliged to drop a Bill similar to that passed in 1829. Between those dates, some minor advances were made. The Middlesex Justices Act 1792 provided for seven mini police forces, each under a magistrates office, to add to the existing Bow street office. In 1800, the Thames river police brought a further dimension to the capital's policing.

Those were ad hoc changes. There was still no unified, organised police force. Numerous parliamentary committees, including an 1822 Select Committee, rejected the idea of such a force, despite huge panic across the country about the mob behaviour and disorder that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. It was argued left and right that any benefits that might accrue from an organised police force would be outweighed by the loss of individual liberty.

Robert Peel was eventually able to secure his vision of a professional London police force. His determination was quickly rewarded. The doubts of the previous decades

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evaporated as the advantages of the 1829 Act became apparent. David Thomson vividly describes the events in his book on "England in the Nineteenth Century", in which he says:

"By establishing very early contact with disorder rather than waiting until it had grown too great to be quelled without bloodshed; by preventing mobs from forming rather than trying to disperse them after they had formed; by creating a spirit of civilian co-operation with the public in the common cause of good order; above all by making the detection and punishment of offenders more inevitable and certain, Peel's police conferred an immense boon on the whole country."

London's model was soon being exported elsewhere.

Mr. David Wilshire (Spelthorne): As the right hon. Gentleman knows, I am very supportive of the Metropolitan police, but he has twice referred to them as London's police force. Will he confirm that they never have been London's police force; they cover an area that includes my constituency and others that are not in London, have never been in London and whose people do not wish to be in London?

Mr. Straw: I understand that. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will approve of the fact that, following representations from him, his colleagues and Surrey county council, I have accepted that the boundaries of the new Metropolitan police force ought to be coterminous with those of the Greater London area.

As I was saying, London's model of policing was soon exported elsewhere, first to the boroughs of England by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 and then to the rural areas by the County Police Act 1839. One notable difference was that the authority to which the police forces outside London were responsible was not the Home Secretary. In the case of the boroughs, it was to a watch committee whose members, until the Police Act 1964, were drawn entirely from the elected members of the municipal council, and elsewhere magistrates in the quarter sessions were empowered to set up a police force and to appoint constables.

Here began a divergence which has persisted to this day. Legislation has modified and updated the police authority structure outside London, while leaving the position of the Home Secretary as the police authority for London untouched. Why should this be so?

Back in 1829, there was considerable fragmentation in the government of London. I have already mentioned the fragmented policing arrangements, but local administration lay in the hands of 150 separate parishes, which were plainly in no position to oversee the activities of a single police force. It says something for the remarkable foresight of Peel that he was able to draw the boundaries of the Metropolitan police force wider even than those drawn in 1963 for the Greater London area, boundaries that we are now accepting. It was said that he drew the boundaries according to the distance that the Commissioner could travel on a horse in a single day.

The establishment of the London county council by the Local Government Act 1888 presented an opportunity for change. Some parliamentarians argued that the London county council should become the police authority. Indeed, Mr. Pickersgill, the Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green, S. W., observed:

"The second point, perhaps, which would attract the attention of the Metropolitan critic was this, that whilst the Metropolitan ratepayers were to provide for the cost of the police they were to have no control over them."--[Official Report, 13 April 1888; Vol. 324, c. 1255.]

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That argument was hard to refute, but it did not win the day. The view was then taken that, because of the unique national and, indeed, imperial functions of the Met, the Home Secretary should remain the police authority. It should also be pointed out that the old LCC covered a much smaller area than the Metropolitan police district--poor alignment of boundaries is not just a modern curse.

The status quo again prevailed in 1962, when the royal commission on the police reported. It argued successfully that the forthcoming London Government Act 1963, which created the Greater London council, should not be used to change the Home Secretary's position. As a result, the Police Act 1964 left arrangements in London as they were.

Next came my own modest contribution to the debate about the policing of London. One of my first actions on entering the House in 1979 was to introduce a private Member's Bill--the Police Authorities (Powers) Bill--in which I proposed, among other things, a police authority for London. Once that Bill had died the usual early death suffered by such Bills, I resurrected my proposals early the next year in the 1980 Police Bill. What I said is something to which I still hold:

"I believe that experience has shown that in the Metropolitan area there is . . . insufficient accountability . . . through local representatives. That can be remedied only by having a Greater London police force responsible to a local and democratically elected police authority."--[Official Report, 11 March 1980; Vol. 980, c. 1156.]

There is one more chapter to record. On 23 March 1993, the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), a former Home Secretary, told the House that the Government's police reform programme would include the creation of a new police authority for the Metropolitan police in line with the new national pattern. However, while the new national pattern duly emerged in the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994, it was not applied to the Metropolitan police area, because the new Home Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), had decided against the policy of his predecessor--not for the first or, indeed, the last time, either on police or many other issues.

I have run through this history because I think that it is important, when making a significant change of the kind now proposed, to understand how things came to be as they are; only then can we be sure whether the change is justified. On this occasion, I believe that the case for change is overwhelming. Moreover, I believe that, once the Metropolitan police authority is established, it will gain acceptance as rapidly as the idea of an organised police force did at the beginning of the previous century.